The eccentric ex-finance minister drafted in two months ago to salvage Israel's 50th anniversary celebrations has tendered his resignation, heightening the atmosphere of farce and fiasco surrounding the jubilee events.
Mr Yitzhak Modai, himself an emergency replacement for the previous Celebrations Association chairman, has sent a letter of resignation to the Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu. Like his predecessor, former army general Yossi Pelled, Mr Modai is quitting because too little money is being allocated to fund impossibly grandiose events, and because of a series of clashes with the minister overseeing the celebrations, Mr Moshe Katzav.
Mr Modai and Mr Katzav reportedly engaged in a vicious screaming match on Monday, after a parliamentary committee refused to allocate the next $16 million instalment of anniversary funding. Mr Modai may yet be persuaded to rescind his resignation, but only if Mr Katzav is relieved of his ministerial responsibility for the jubilee.
Despite the collapse of the peace process, the prospect of new conflict with the Palestinians and a worsening economic climate, the government laid tentative plans last year for an extravagant celebration of the anniversary of Israel's 1948 establishment. But the project has been undermined by resignations, funding arguments and ego clashes.
The original chairman of the international organising committee, Mr Edgar Bronfman, found himself shunted aside. An initial allocation of some $70 million has been continually whittled down. Centrepiece ceremonies have been cancelled, as have plans for satellite jubilee broadcasts, mass fly-ins of young Jews from around the world, and all sorts of symposia and conferences. Even the scheduled anniversary-year opening event, on the first night of the Hannukkah festival last month, had to be rearranged because President Ezer Weizman had made other plans for that night.
Since Mr Modai took over from the disheartened Mr Pelled, he has garnered most publicity by endorsing calls for a jubilee clemency for Israel's criminals - an idea delightedly taken up by prisoners (who have taken to occasional hunger-strikes to press the cause) and their families (who held a raucous pro-clemency demonstration in Jerusalem earlier this week), but rejected in horror by most members of the Israeli judicial establishment.
Capitalising on the government's embarrassment, a leader of the opposition Labour Party yesterday suggested scrapping the jubilee events and redirecting the funding to poor towns with high unemployment levels.
David Horovitz is managing editor of the Jerusalem Post.